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An unmatched tycoon experience, with all the features and fun necessary to manage and maintain your Zoo animals!

Description :

You are responsible for your animals happiness and must anticipate their needs; their desire to play, to have babies…The Zoo Tycoon 2 Mobile Photo feature lets you take photos of your animals, to build your own photo album and earn new game-related content.

Zoo Tycoon 2 Mobile, the Smartphone version of the popular PC game from Blue Fang Games and Microsoft Games Studios, provides the kind of Tamagotchi experience so many of you have been crying out for. A chance to raise zoo animals from infancy to adulthood, tending for their needs and building a habitat for them that will be suitable for their needs. The better the habitat, the happier your animals are. The happier your animals are, the more money your exhibit makes. Success will allow you to unlock more exhibits and eventually other zoos. Along the way you might even find your animals produce offspring.

In order to make it easy to get into, the game begins with a short tutorial with the basics you need to know to begin tending your zoo animals. This involves equipping each of your animal pens with the right terrain and objects, for example, the tigers you start with like grass with a scattering of trees. You'll then be taught to care for your animal by feeding it, playing with it, and so on. All through the game your zoo animals will show their approval or otherwise, helping you to work out the right terrain, objects, and care for each animal.

The game comes with three zoos, each with several exhibits to keep you occupied. You'll probably manage to complete the game in due course (I’m in the first exhibit of the last zoo) but there is longevity in being able to return to your favourite exhibits, continuing from where you left off.

Graphics and sound

The game ran with no problems on my SPV E200. The graphics are good even if the animals can seem a little small. One of the first things that struck me was the music. Good music. Good to see also that the vibrate function is used to good effect, providing feedback, positive or otherwise, when your animals happiness level changes.

Photo Objectives

The game includes the option of taking snapshots of your animals which you can save and look at later. A novel feature included in the game is the ability to unlock new content in the PC version of Zoo Typhoon 2 by completing photo objectives. These include taking pictures of a lonely elephant or of a benegal tiger swimming, etc.

Impressions and unlockable features

Sounds good huh? Well the good news is it is quite addictive, even if regularly cleaning the dung out of the animal pens (yes, you even have to do that!) can get a little wearing after a while. To help against it getting repetitive the game allows you to progress (once you've raised enough funds) from exhibit to exhibit, all the time introducing new animals, new terrains and new objects. Panda bears, giraffes, guerrillas, rhinos and more. There are plenty of animals there to be unlocked and to create new exhibits for.

Controls

The controls are quite easy to get used to, utilising the joystick/direction pad to move a curser around the screen and icons to select what you want to do. If you are in a hurry you can use hotkeys whereby a press of a button on your Smartphone will select an option without having to move the pointer to it. These hotkeys are unfortunately not definable but as you’ve already got two methods of controlling the game this is forgivable.

Summary

An enjoyable game that will keep you playing even after you finish the last objective. This is certainly one of the best tycoon type games on the Smartphone and ideal for any user seeking a Tamagotchi type experience.

For those with a C550 the game still plays well but it's best to read the

Help menu first as the visual indications for the softkeys are not displayed. The only other display glitch I have noticed is the money text is not displayed in the box correctly. Apart from that I have not encountered any other problems.

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I agree. It's quite poor that their software doesn't support their own OS correctly.

But did this actually come out before the C550? I remember people talking about Zoo Tycoon 2 and Midtown Madness 3 quite a long time ago. People at that time seemed to have some version of Midtown Madness 3.

If that's the case and there weren't any QVGA smartphone devices out at that time, it's not so bad (but not very forward-thinking).

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I'd let off the folks who coded games upto now (before the C550 release) for not being compatible with QVGA but as the weeks go by it will be less and less acceptable for new releases not to support it.